Schindler factory to house museum

A factory in Poland once owned by Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist credited with saving some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, will house a new museum, a museum official said.

"A branch of the Krakow city historical museum will be opened Thursday evening in Oskar Schindler's Emalia factory," Krakow city museum official Marta Smietana told AFP Wednesday.

A multi-media display focusing on daily life in the southern city during World War II (1939-44) will be open to the public in the former Schindler enamelware factory from Friday, she added.

Schindler, an ethnic German hailing from Czechoslovakia and member of the Nazi party who first sought to profit after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, began protecting his Jewish workers from the Nazis.

Towards the end of the war he spent his entire fortune on feeding Jewish employees and bribing Nazi SS troopers not to kill them.

He saved some 1,200 Jews by putting their names on a list of workers performing labour essential for the Nazi war effort.

He died in anonymity in Germany in 1974 at the age of 66 but his story was first plucked from anonymity by Australian writer Thomas Keneally, and then made famous by US film director Steven Spielberg's 1993 film "Schindler's List" which won seven Oscars.